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“Tonight I’ve chosen to play the one band the
American Fascicrats don’t want me to play. Tonight I’m going off the
air with the music of Hierophant. For those of you not familiar,
you’ll get a taste of Hierophant’s music tonight – their message,
their light.”
- Will
O’ The Wisp
Forget everything you thought you knew about
Shooter Jennings.
The acclaimed singer-songwriter is kicking off
a bold new chapter in his career with new band HIEROPHANT and Black
Ribbons (Black Country Rock/Rocket Science Ventures), a mind-blowing
70-minute opus that completely obliterates genre distinctions. On
this unprecedented work, twanging dobros coexist with Nintendo
chipsets; brutally assaultive passages alternate with moments of
unabashed tenderness, and surreal Floydian soundscapes float above
smoking slabs of whiskey-soaked southern soul. It’s an electrifying
thrill ride across a dense, dark and gloriously decadent musical
landscape.
At its core, Black Ribbons is a concept album
about truth—searching for it, locating it, wrestling with it and
eventually coming to terms with it. From the opening track (and lead
single) “Wake Up!,” a pummeling psychotropic stomp that sets the
album’s tone, to the synth-injected paranoiac anthem “When The Radio
Goes Dead,” this elliptical narrative takes the listener on a
harrowing, life-affirming and altogether rapturous journey.
The album
is bound together by the voice of Will O’ The Wisp, a late-night
talk-radio beatnik who is in the last hour of his final broadcast
before the airwaves are overtaken by “government-approved and
regulated transmissions.” In retaliation for his muzzling, he speaks
his mind like never before, punctuating his rants with selections
from the discography of Hierophant. Throughout the album’s 14 songs,
Will O’ The Wisp flits in and out, painting an apocalyptic picture
of what America could become in the not-so-distant future, while
offering his loyal listeners—from whom he is about to be permanently
cut off—the unvarnished truth.
The seeds of the album were
planted during a particularly intense period for Jennings. He and
his fiancée had just had their first child, Alabama, and sobered by
this blessed event, he was feeling restless about his artistic
direction and ready to take stock of himself as a human being. On
2008’s Waylon Forever, Shooter, with the help of long-time producer
Dave Cobb and his band the .357’s, had resurrected and recreated
music for an album Shooter and his father, country music pioneer
Waylon Jennings, had started when Shooter was 16. The album,
featuring Waylon’s voice over progressive re-workings of some of his
hits, foreshadowed what was to come, as Waylon’s voice acted as a
launching pad for Shooter and his band’s musical experiments.
Jennings
considers Waylon Forever “a bow tied on the past—the swan song of
what I’d been doing up to that point,” as he puts it. “And after the
birth of our daughter, I was doing a lot of soul searching. My
record company wanted me to change my recording process to fit their
idea of how a record was made and I just wasn’t into that, so we
parted ways. I found myself on my own as an artist for the first
time in six years, and at that moment, I was forced to face exactly
who I was, my mistakes included—it was like everything was on a
plate sitting right in front of me. I had this urge to open up
everything I had inside of me and put it down on the page. So I
started writing and it became sort of a cleansing process. Then I
called up Dave Cobb and told him I wanted to make a different kind
of record—a new adventure. And no matter what people would think, it
was important to not be afraid of anything. I was ready to follow my
inspiration, wherever it took me.”
So in September of 2008,
Jennings left New York and headed to Los Angeles to begin recording
the album. He took the long way, driving cross-country in an old RV.
It was during this trip that everything changed—the financial
systems fell and the world went into a panic.
“I
remember sitting there in the driver’s seat listening to whatever I
could find on the radio. I would tune in to various AM stations,
talk shows, political commentary, and some very dark and bizarre
stuff that you can only find while twisting the dials in the middle
of nowhere. There was so much fear and speculation about how America
and the rest of the world was going to survive—if at all—and so many
people more than willing to exploit it. A very clear picture of a
looming police state and a very dark oppressive worldwide political
regime began to reveal itself. I had always loved late-night talk
radio, but for the first time, I was right there with them,
traveling with the fear and the lack of answers, and I was
completely captivated. I realized I wanted to create an experience
like this, taking it on a fictional level to a possible future.”
By
the time he got to L.A., Shooter was overflowing with ideas, the
concept for the album already taking shape in what he calls “this
inspirational spark that cracked my mind open.” He and Cobb holed up
in the producer's basement studio and laid down all kinds of sounds
on a multitude of axes and machines. After they’d programmed the
bulk of the tracks, they brought in a pair of .357 alumni, bass
player Ted Russell Kamp and drummer Brian Keeling, along with his
buddy, the virtuoso guitarist Jonathan Wilson (host of the Wednesday
night Laurel Canyon jams). The core players, a.k.a. Hierophant,
replaced the programmed parts and recorded several designated tracks
from scratch live off the floor. On the title track, Robby Turner
played acoustic and dobro and Bobby Emmett played keys, while
Shooter’s mother, outlaw country’s first lady Jessi Colter, and his
sister, Jennifer Davis, sang background vocals.
With
Black Ribbons, Shooter Jennings has created something true to
himself, to his art and his beliefs. Sonically, it draws from
Jennings’ disparate influences—the Beatles’ White Album to Pink
Floyd’s The Wall, from Skinny Puppy and Ministry to Lynyrd Skynyrd
and Black Oak Arkansas. At the same time, it forms an intensely
personal song cycle, as this young artist probes his own roiling
psyche and the tumult of modern-day existence.“
I gotta admit that early in
the process, I went through a few moments of self-doubt,” he says.
“But the experience of making the record shut those demons right up.
The bigger picture became much clearer to me and I knew I didn't
have just a record on my hands, I had a mission. It was like being
blind-folded but trusting your instincts so that when you jump, you
land on your feet. I'm extremely proud of this record and the fact
that we were able to push my vision through one hundred percent. I
know some folks may be surprised at how different this record is
compared to my previous works, but I'm sure once they dig in they'll
find something that speaks to them. After all, it's the twisted road
that matters, not the destination."
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